Featured Artist: Raymond Swanland
Raymond Swanland is a fairly accomplished artist in the fantasy / science fiction space, being perhaps best known for his illustrations for the Oddworld video game series. He’s apparently only done a handful of metal CD covers so far, but the few he has done are pretty awesome. The covers for Psycroptic’s “Ob(Servant)” and Deeds of Flesh’s “Crown of Souls” and “Of What’s To Come” are among his recent creations.
Swanland’s website has a really interesting Q + A section which describes some of Swanland’s techniques. Apparently he started out painting with acrylics on canvas, but nowadays he makes extensive use of Photoshop and a graphic tablet, which seems to be what a lot of today’s metal artists are doing.
He also goes into some detail about how he constructs an image, starting with a sketch, moving the main elements into Photoshop layers, and finally applying details. It was interesting going back to the gallery after reading about his process - things like his use of the darkest base for the foreground images to accentuate the subject of his paintings are really evident in the final works.
RaymondSwanland.com has an extensive gallery with a bunch of his work, but not too much of his metal-related stuff is in there, unfortunately. He doesn’t currently have any paintings for sale but he plans to in the near future, and is taking suggestions for which ones to offer first. So if you see some paintings that you like, let him know!
